How to Be Loved

I had always lived by ambition. I had always lived for my future. Always. What I was going to do next, how I was going to do it. When I’d first gotten sick, I’d seen every plot point as a detour, as a hairpin twist that was interfering with the way my life was supposed to be. I’d always been on my way somewhere. Things were going to be great when. Things would finally be okay if. All I had to do was this one thing. Invest in my future. Plan for the future. But what about now? What about this moment?

In all of the literature about friendship, in all of the advice columns and podcasts and essays and posts about how to be a good friend, I rarely come across its most fundamental point, the one that I learned during these years, over and over again. That friendship, true friendship, is often just about two (or more) people who love each other. The details, which are often extravagant, are just the details.

“We have a freedom, living on this side,” Allison said to me once, after I joined her in the kingdom of the ill, as we sat together in her car, driving to Whole Foods and then to her house, Sadie on a blanket on my lap. She stopped the car, pulled to the side of the road, turned to me. This was important enough for her to stop driving.
“The thing is,” she said, “it’s very, very, very expensive.”
There was a freedom. Things that I had cared so deeply about didn’t matter anymore. The fourteenth time I was on a gurney waiting for the saline to kick in was the first time I didn’t care that it was a Tuesday or a Thursday, a day on which otherwise I would have made myself try to be productive. My grad school cohorts were surpassing me, passing their exams, publishing papers, presenting at conferences. It was, for the first time, okay that I wasn’t the biggest star. (I wasn’t even on the radar.) I was starting to take pleasure in the tiniest of things: in a Momofuku cake a friend had sent from Portland via New York, a box of bath powder that came in beautiful packaging from a friend traveling through Europe; finding a T-shirt that said ZERO FUCKS GIVEN and wearing it to a doctor appointment, under a sweater, of course. I felt myself leaning into these moments of freedom, of laughter. I watched The Lonely Island music videos and when there was a truly funny scene, I laughed, and as I laughed I felt my body move, felt the laughter move its way through my brain and into my bones, and I stopped myself and put my hand on my chest and felt my chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and I knew that I was alive.